Across Colorado, county clerks are preparing for the first presidential election since former President Donald Trump denied the results of his 2020 loss. The conspiracy theories he and his supporters promoted ultimately led not only to the attack on our country’s Capitol, but to localized threats of violence against election officials nationwide as well as here in Colorado.
One of the most prominent election fraud conspiracy theorists is MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who, after his attempt to convince Trump to consider retaining power via martial law failed, decided to fund a group of Colorado election deniers to launch a national version of their state-based conspiracy club.
Early this month, Rolling Stone reported that Lindell’s election fraud conspiracy group, dubbed the Election Crime Bureau (ECB), sent a form email to county clerks in Georgia. The email asked clerks for information on their county’s election security measures and used the subject line: “Election Integrity Information Sharing and Analysis Center (EI-ISAC),” which is the name of a real federal government organization designed to help election officials conduct safe and secure elections.
Lindell’s group sent the same email to clerks nationwide, including in Colorado.
Reached via text, Lindell says that “many [clerks] in Colorado returned the surveys,” but declined to provide a total number or any names. Lindell has continued to be personally active in Colorado and not just because he’s being sued for defamation by Denver-based Dominion Voting Systems. Last month he gave the keynote address at the El Paso County Republicans Lincoln Day Dinner.
The Center for Election Security, which houses EI-ISAC, sent out an advisory warning to election officials across the country the same day ECB sent its email.
One of the substantive questions on the ECB survey was about a security device called an Albert sensor, which detects attempts to hack into secure networks. Election conspiracists have been pushing for local officals to remove the devices, with some success in conservative counties.
A spokesperson for the Boulder County clerk confirmed that two ECB emails were sent to county email addresses, but that just as happened in Georgia, the emails were intercepted by the county’s spam filters. The spokesperson also acknowledged that their office had been warned
Matt Crane, Executive Director of the Colorado County Clerks Association, confirmed in a phone interview that spam filters caught multiple emails from the ECB to Colorado clerks. He says that while he is unaware of any Colorado clerks having filled out and returned the form, he couldn’t say for sure it didn’t happen. That said, he noted, it’s not uncommon for Lindell to be wrong.
Speaking on a Zoom call with Lindell’s other election conspiracy group, Cause of America, ECB staffer Patrick Colbeck, a former Michigan state legislator, discussed the project with Shawn Smith, a retired Air Force colonel from Colorado who was one of the original election conspiracists Lindell recruited to join Cause of America. Smith has called for the hanging of Colorado’s secretary of state and personally clashed with U.S. Capitol Police during the Jan. 6 insurrection.
Asked about whether providing details about a county’s use of Albert or Falcon sensors, the monitoring software used to identify and prevent network intrusion could create any security problems, he said no, but added that this doesn’t stop bad actors from claiming it does. “Maybe Lindell thinks removing them will allow the Millennium Falcon to shoot lasers into the sensors to steal data,” Crane quipped. He compared the sensors to the “no-fly” lists that airlines use. When a flagged IP address tries to access a network, the sensor notifies the user. Albert sensors do not have access to any data inside the networks. They stand outside the gate to protect them.
In response to Smith’s claims in the video below that CIS is intentionally “[networking] election equipment in a covert and insecure manner,” Crane suggested that Smith’s motives might be more driven by politics than policy.
“He wants different election results, and thinks he can get them by reducing voting turnout with in-person voting, and reducing the accuracy, security, and transparency of the elections by hand counting ballots at remote locations,” Crane said. “They can’t attack the arguments we’re making about secure elections, so they attack the institutions, like CIS, that protect them.”
On the Zoom, Smith sarcastically asked Colbeck, “Is ECB still impersonating a government organization when it demands personal information from Georgia officials?”
Colbeck dismissed the government’s claim by noting that the emails included the Election Crime Bureau logo. He then explained that ECB was able to reach the nation’s thousands of election officials via CiviClick, a company that says it offers “AI-Powered technology for modern advocacy campaigns,” with the goal of reaching legislators and regulators. CiviClick lists the recently dissolved Koch-funded advocacy group FreedomWorks among its clients.
CiviClick did not respond to a voicemail requesting confirmation that it works with Lindell’s group and whether or not it has any concerns about its digital activism tools being used by election fraud conspiracists. This article will be updated with any response received.
The EI-ISAC is a voluntary partnership organization created by the cybersecurity division of the Department of Homeland Security and is “open to all state, local, tribal, and territorial organizations that support election officials in the United States.”
Shawn Smith: So my first question is, is ECB still impersonating a government organization when it demands personal information from Georgia officials, or have you stopped doing that since Rolling Stone wrote that bullshit article?
Patrick Colbeck: Yeah, that was interesting. Obviously we’re over the target. There’s no way anybody that’s got two cells that are still receiving oxygen in their brain could consider that an attempt to impersonate CIS. We had our ECB logo- everything on there. So it’s- Yes. So for those of you who haven’t heard, we put out a survey to– you know, through CiviClick we have access to contact information for all county, state and federal elected officials all through the country. And so we reached out and asked them, ‘are you still a member of the Election Integrity, Information Sharing and Analysis Center?’ And if so, have you installed one of their Albert sensors?
Now why is this important? Because first and foremost, Center for Internet Security is the organization that was contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to secure our election systems, which we’re told are not connected to the Internet. So we want to understand how widespread the adoption rate is for the EI-ISAC Center. I’ve got data back from 2022 that shows that there are 2173 members in this EI-ISAC Center, managed by this private company called Center for Internet Security and it’s spanned all 50 states. So these people with these Albert sensors that they had installed had access to the sensitive election records like voter registration data, call book data tabulation data, election night reports from all 50 states. And if you’ve been watching all of our FrankSpeech summits over the last couple of years, you’ve gotten a taste of this already from myself and Dr. Charles Bernadin and Professor Clements and a lot of people that have been talking about it.
Well, we decided to go beyond the presentation form and actually reach out to these officials and CIS pushed back, claiming that we were trying to impersonate CIS and they call that misinformation. So Mike and I have been dealing with all these media calls from Washington Post and Rolling Stone and all that kind of stuff. And it’s just all complete balderdash. All we’re doing is asking for information about the organization.
Smith: Now I can say if you wanted to impersonate CIS, you take hundreds of millions of dollars from the government and you’d lie about the elections, and then you could network the election equipment in a covert and insecure manner.
Smith did not respond to an email request for comment. This article will be updated with any response received.
